Howdo I start a daily journal at this point in my life? Part of the problem is
definitions. I've never been consistent about keeping a journal, but I've been
jotting down my thoughts and observations quite regularly for years. One major
purpose of this project is to inject some discipline and structure into my daily
writing process. If a side-effect of that routine is that I get more work done on
my novel (that is, finish it), so much the better. If it only gives me a single
coherent place to keep track of all of my unfinished business, that will also
prove useful. But this means that I feel like I have a backlog of issues to
discuss. Even though the most recent episode of
Enterzone
has been out for almost
two months, I still have typos to correct in the
interview
I did with Hunter and Anton about
Zero,
and I have unfinished or uncorrected documents attached to
that interview to update as well. That's just one of many things that have been
niggling at me from the top or the middle of my to-do list for fortnights now.

Then there's the odd situation of having another daily writing project appear out
of the blue just a week ago. I started
the Daily Barbie
when I received a
threatening letter from a lawyer for Mattel. The upside is that it provided a
miniature spring training of sorts, to permit me to get used to this idea of
producing something daily, of doing the sifting and sorting work through the
artifacts and records of my day-to-day life, in order to build a coherent
narrative. But this Barbie "problem" is open-ended, so I'm going to have two
daily projects to update for who knows how long, not to mention chapters to write
of the
BeOS
book I'm coauthoring with
Kevin Savetz,
revisions (for the third
edition) of
Internet for Busy People,
and, as Nick would say "and on and on and
on and on" or "dot-de-dot-de-dot-de-dot."

Ultimately, the deeper goal - I believe - is to get myself to (as we used to say
in kindergarten) stop, look, and listen. Stop what I'm doing from time to time.
Silence myself. Notice, pay attention to my feelings. Permit whatever wants to
come up to well to the surface of my being, and then sing.

x

33 today, I thought of naming this journal
"outliving christ," but that doesn't
feel right. the nice thing about this kind of project is that even if it does one
day build an audience (and the public nature of this journal is a fulcrum to
promote honesty and self-revelation), there's sure to be just about no one reading
it at first, besides a few well-wishing friends I've tipped off in advance, which
gives me a little breathing room, a little.